Vehicles powered by internal combustion engines are significant contributors to air pollution and account for, by some estimates, more than 25% of the total energy and 70% of the total petroleum consumed in the United States. Further, fuel consumption and the pollution resulting from the use of internal combustion engines impose a variety of health, economic, and environmental burdens on society. For example, exhaust byproducts of internal combustion engines make the air more difficult to breathe and are generally thought to harm the natural environment. Moreover, liberal and/or wasteful use of the Nation's and World's petroleum reserves depletes these reserves at an unwise and unnecessary rate.
Numerous solutions exist for reducing fuel consumption in internal combustion engines, including some that utilize catalytic aerosols to improve combustion efficiencies. For instance, prior art systems have relied upon the Venturi effect and/or an electric pump to produce and deliver an aerosol to a combustion chamber of an engine. However, these mechanisms can be inconsistent, unreliable, and/or expensive, particularly relative to their benefits. For instance, electric pumps are typically prone to failure and are often quite expensive. Likewise, systems utilizing the Venturi effect are typically sensitive to their position within an air stream and/or they may not deliver the correct flow rate for a requisite pressure and volume. Consequently, and particularly in light of variations between engines which may occur as a result of manufacturer, class, year and/or equipment configuration, insertion of prior art Venturi systems is often based on guesswork. Guesswork, in turn, may lead to a variety of unintended and/or unwanted consequences—e.g., inconsistent and/or unreliable installation results, performance variations, and the like. Thus, a need exists for system that is able to reliably, consistently, and at a low cost deliver a catalytic aerosol to an internal combustion engine.